Blogging Pedagogy - gender

Dealing with Discomfort in Classroom Discussions

Kate Stevenson — Mon, 03 Nov 2014 19:16:31 +0000

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Miami Classroom by Fredler Brave, from Wikipedia

Looking through the tags on Blogging Pedagogy earlier this semester, Rhiannon Goad’s lone post tagged “trans*” jumped out at me. In my experience, graduate students talk a lot amongst ourselves about uncomfortable, uncertain, or potentially hurtful situations we encounter in our classrooms, but we don’t often write about them or discuss them with our faculty mentors. If you’re like me, Rhiannon’s post may not have brought up memories of experiences with trans* students specifically, but it probably brought up at least one memory of a difficult to navigate situation involving a fraught topic like race, gender, or sexuality in our classrooms. Thinking back on my own teaching experiences, I wonder when we as instructors should intervene in these situations, and how we can keep our classrooms feeling as safe as possible for all of our students while also keeping our discussions open and honest.

I can think of one good example of a classroom incidents when I had to decide whether or not to intervene because of something that a student said during a discussion. While we were talking about a novel assigned in a British literature course, one of my students raised her hand and described a character using a string of offensive words. Half of the class turned to stare at her; the other half looked down at their books, squirming awkwardly. At first, I froze too. Should I call this student out on her offensive statement? Should I continue the discussion as if nothing happened? Should I start a discussion about the terminology that’s acceptable in this classroom? Finally, I asked her to "clarify" what she had said, and under the disapproving gaze of her classmates, she used different words. Later I wondered: Did I do enough to make the classroom feel safe for my other students? Should I have confronted this student about the repercussions of what she said? Should I have spoken to her in class or outside of class? Should I have followed up with some discussion about what we all heard?

When possible, I try not to intervene in classroom discussions, especially with older, more talkative students like the ones in my current rhetoric class. Teaching the Rhetoric of Tourism, race and gender are common topics of discussion; students deserve the space to resolve disagreements and fully discuss "awkward" topics amongst themselves. And obviously, all of our students cannot be completely comfortable with what is said in the classroom one hundred percent of the time. But what are some things we can do to make our classrooms feel safe(r), in Rhiannon’s words, for most of our students most of the time?

1. Model the language that we want to see used in our classrooms. This means discouraging the use of derogatory language as well as correcting incorrect language. This has been especially important in my Rhetoric of Tourism classroom, where my students often come across inflammatory and offensive texts and grapple with how to describe other people's often bigoted opinions.

2. Admit that there are problems with race, gender, and sexuality that merit discussion. My students are fond of referring to racism as something that “used to happen” or that was an issue “back in the day,” and they tend to avoid mention of sexuality at all costs. As instructors, we can interrogate the tendency to avoid these issues instead of letting them be swept under the rug, and use current examples to remind our students that discrimination is not a thing of the past.

3. Hold everyone accountable. We all want to avoid confrontation with our students, but that doesn’t mean we have to let them get away with insensitive comments. When a student says something offensive or makes a generalization, question them: “Why do you say that?” “What makes you think so?” or even simply, “Always?” “Everyone?” can be effective ways to coax students into reflecting on their beliefs and experiences.

4. This means holding yourself accountable, too. Was I projecting some of my own discomfort and fear of confrontation onto my students in the literature classroom? Undoubtedly. It’s just as important to keep a dialogue open with ourselves as with our students, about what our own conscious or subconscious prejudices are, what we feel particularly emotional about, and what makes us uncomfortable and why.

5. Work on your own demeanor. As we’ve all experienced, discussions about topics like race, gender, and sexuality can quickly change the atmosphere of a classroom from relaxed to incredibly fraught. We should do our best to project openness and trust, not anxiety. We can try to model the behavior we’d like to see your students exhibit towards each other.

Creating a Safe(r) Classroom for Trans* Students

Rhiannon Goad — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 17:16:08 +0000

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Rhiannon Goad

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Students With a Mission: NASA Puts the 'Can Do' Project in Orbit. National Geographic Magazine, August 1994, Vol.186, Issue 2.

“The bottom line is that legal names ‘out’ folks who are trans* all the time.”

I believe that most of us here at the DWRL want to create safes space for trans* students. Unfortunately, creating a safe classroom isn’t always the most intuitive practice--especially when it’s so easy to stay blissfully ignorant about cisgender privilege. Personally, I’ve never intended to make trans* students uncomfortable. Still, as I think back to my experiences as a TA and AI, I can’t help but notice things I could have done better. Regardless of intention, that’s not cool. One of the things I could have done better? Roll call.

For a lot of us, having our legal first-name broadcast to the world is nbd, if not mildly obnoxious. However, for some, legal names are linked to exposure and potential violence. Especially for a trans* student whose preferred name isn’t their legal name. There’s no way for a student to use their “preferred name” through the UT system. So what you see on your roster is a legal name, not a preferred name. This makes the common practice of reading out your roster and asking students to tell you their preferred name a risky practice. Especially for a student whose legal name connotes a different gender than their preferred name. As Shane O. Whalley, Education coordinator for the Gender and Sexuality Center puts it, “The bottom line is that legal names ‘out’ folks who are trans* all the time.”

As instructors, coupling a student in our classroom with their first name via their UT student records is mandatory. It’s how we report grades, failure reports, look up contact information, and a bunch of other important stuff. What’s a well-meaning educator to do?

First: It’s a good practice to assume that you have trans* students at any and all the time. Likewise, it’s a good practice to treat all students with dignity and respect. This means not playing the role of gender detective, but rather approaching the issue of names in a careful and thoughtful way all the time.

Second: Never post your official UT rooster for all students to see. Don’t call out names. Likewise, don’t push students to tell you if the University has them using a different first name in earshot of other students.

Finally: Have a better strategy. Consider using a sign-in sheet that asks for student’s for their information in a discrete way (remember to ask for both name and UT ID so you can keep your administrative records in order.) Last semester, I used an online survey to gather students information, where students introduced themselves in class and completed a Google Survey outside of class. Everyone responded. My survey asked students their major and email alongside their preferred name and gender pronoun. If you go this route, make sure that the settings secure so that only you can see students’ responses (duh.)

Striving to make the classroom safe for trans* students doesn't end with roll call, but changing up how we address students is a good place to start. Balancing this stuff isn’t easy but, and I hope we’re all on the same page with this, there’s no other option. To help us out, there’s loads of other good resources from the Gender and Sexuality Center.

Video Games, Queer Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:34:15 +0000

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Kevin Bourque

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Fallout: New Vegas

Since early 2006 – when Blizzard Entertainment met with criticism and controversy for threatening to oust a player advertising a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)-friendly World of Warcraft guild – queer visibility in the world of gaming has exploded. Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony gave the world of gaming its first eponymous queer character, “Gay” Tony Prince, just last year; and, as though mirroring America’s slow shift in public opinion from “separate-but-equal” solutions to full-fledged marriage equality, mere same-sex cohabitation in the Sims 2 graduated nine years later to gay marriages in the Sims 3 (2009). Dragon Age: Origins, from that same year, includes a memorable elf-on-elf scene which, in the words of the conservative World Net Daily, “depicts two men in various sex positions in a secret scene of homosexual seduction.” And finally, ongoing controversy over the possibility of same-sex coupling in Mass Effect 2 has prompted Bioware to lock down any forum discussion on the subject – perhaps in a misguided attempt, similar to Blizzard’s five years ago, to protect sexual minorities from abuse by mandating their invisibility.

The newfound visibility of queers in games serves as a kind of compelling synecdoche for our increasing, if troubled, presence in popular culture. It offers, too, a unique case study in sexual identity, complementing ongoing debates in queer activism, theory and culture as to how LGBT identity is created to begin with, and offering a compelling resource to teaching and scholarship on theories of sexual identity – in courses such as my own Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture, or other courses grappling with the rhetorics of gender, sexuality, and identity formation.

In her foundational Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick traced a governing tension between minoritizing and universalizing approaches to sexual identity, the former seeing homosexuality as the purview of a minority of actual homosexuals and the latter as a possibility for all persons, across a wide range of sexualities. This tension – along with the complementary binary of essentialist (one is intrinsically gay or lesbian) versus constructionist (all sexualities are socially constructed, shaped and formed by context) models – governs our notions of sexual identity. The making of sexual identity in contemporary video games demonstrates these ongoing debates, making thorny if foundational concepts in queer studies far more apparent and intuitive to the student.

The Sims (2000), for example, takes a generously universalizing approach. In lieu of making a particular sexual identity part of the character-formation process, developers chose to populate the game entirely with equal-opportunity Kinsey-3’s, each character intrinsically bisexual. Left to his or her own devices, a Sim is equally able to form romantic attachment with either sex, and one’s sexual identity is predicated more on interpersonal connection than on any intrinsic or personal difference.

Contrariwise, the recent Fallout: New Vegas has taken a minoritizing perspective, even building sexual minority status into the process of character formation. Character “perks,” such as the aptly-named Confirmed Bachelor trait, define one’s character as gay (Cherchez la Femme, incidentally, is the lesbian version) as they offers bonuses in conversations with sexual minority non-player characters.

1. Confirmed Batchelor used in dialogue; a gay NPC's response

Finally, other video games are destabilizing sex, gender and sexuality outright. In MolleIndustria’s Queer Power, styled after fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur, two players race to beat each other to sexual orgasm while seamlessly transforming in gender, sexual position and erotic activity. Queer Power is, in the words of creator Paolo Pedercini, “loosely inspired by queer theory and particularly the work of gender theorist Judith Butler,” and as in Butler’s groundbreaking work – which thinks through how the performance of gender in fact constructs the categories of sexuality, gender, and even biological sex – how you act defines what you are, not vice-versa. The concept, as well as the theorist’s notoriously convoluted writerly style, is likewise reflected in a recent release from the UCLA conceptual-design outfit Queer Technologies: TransCoder, a “Queer Programming Anti-Language” which offers “libraries rooted in theories of queerness as an attempt to sever ontological and epistemological ties to dominant technologies and interrupt the flow of circulation between heternormative culture, coding, and visual interface.”

2. MolleIndustria's Queer Power; Queer Technology's Transcoder